So that explains the slash fans

[gwyn]

Obligatory weekend wrap-up: Thanks to everyone for the kind words about my sister. It's hard to not feel frightened and anxious about all of this, and it would be an understatement to say that I am utterly panicked by surgery of any kind, so the idea of them opening her up possibly into her chest cavity doesn't sit well. And I am deeply afeared of this kind of cancer, so until we know for certain there isn't cancer, I'm going to be a wreck, but it means a lot to me to know that people care.

I had a wonderful time Friday night meeting minim_calibre and onetwomany, who'd come all the way from Australia for Writercon and was tooling around the western states, and whom I've always wanted to meet. I was a terrible hostess, frazzled and with nothing to offer my poor guests, but it was so enjoyable to sit and yammer about everything from con gossip to the price of housing in Australia to comics. I wish I hadn't been so tired and Sabre had to hit the road in the morning; I would have loved to stay up all night chatting.

My writing group continues to be the highlight of my month. This weekend I don't know what it was -- something in the water, the round table as opposed to the rectangular table we usually sit at, or what -- but we were unbelievably silly and wrote great exercise pieces and came up with a title for a fringe play by talking about Firefly and hands-free cellphones -- two different hearing/speaking blunders gave us "Space Catholics and the Headless Cell Phone", for which we wrote reviews and blurbs for the promotional poster. I truly adore my writing group.

*****

And lastly, I usually plow through my issue of Discover magazine quickly, because there's always at least one good article, but mostly it's stuff I can't understand like quantum physics and molecular science and paleontology. If you've never read Discover, it's a great magazine, kind of like Scientific American for Joe Blow. But last month they had many incredible articles, including a piece on twin studies (finally, an article about twins that doesn't mythologize us and spend all its time on that absurd notion that twins share every single possible characteristic and never vary), the myth of recovered memory, and an article about forbidden science -- studies that have come under fire or had funding axed because they're about sex or related social things. I found the whole issue fascinating, because I've often believed what politicians have said regarding these studies -- that they're a waste of money. But this article put it in very clear perspective just how much sexual patterns and practices can affect everyone's lives as well as the public spending for disease control, etc.

Buried in the article were these two paragraphs, which I found completely astonishing:

The first involves probing the brain to understand the nature of sexuality. At Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for instance, psychologist J. Michael Bailey and his former graduate student, Meredith Chivers, have discovered that men and women are fundamentally different in their arousal patterns. Bailey and Chivers fitted their research subjects with instruments designed to measure blood flow to their genitals, then showed them explicit two-minute video clips. The male participants responded predictably: Heterosexuals were aroused when they watched women having sex with women; gay men responded to watching men having sex with men. But women had a different reaction: All the film clips aroused them equally. “Their sexual arousal doesn’t seem to map onto their stated sexual preference,” says Chivers, who is now a fellow at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. (boldface mine)

The implications of the Northwestern studies are enormous. For one, they start to explain why Viagra doesn’t work for women, even though it stimulates blood flow to the genitals: The relationship between physiological arousal and sexual function is complicated. The results also offer important information to psychotherapists whose clients are struggling with sexual issues. “Because we have a male model of sexuality, women who don’t fit that model feel they’re different or weird,” says University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond. The new findings may help clinicians whose female patients are confused by their erotic reactions to the “wrong” sex, for example.

This fascinated me for a number of reasons, but mostly in regards to the interest by women in male/male slash. I thought this went very far to explain, scientifically, that there really is a valid reason why this might be more attractive to women than people seem to understand. I've certainly seen plenty of soft-science "explanations" for the attraction in academia, and in the popular media, but none have ever adequately explained it from a perspective of wiring. In fact, most of the popular explanations leave me cold or bitter; they're reductive and insulting most of the time. But I like the fact that this takes into account that old male model of sexuality and of women not fitting that model so they feel like freaks, and that many of the women in the study responded to arousing images the same way, without regard to orientation.

For me, that was one of the most concise and cogent arguments for the way women of many different orientations respond, when they respond positively, to slash. I'd be interested to know what others think (though, like herself_nyc did this weekend in her discussion of slash, I'd love to hear people's thoughts if you can behave like an adult and discuss from a reasonable perspective rather than lashing out at others who don't share your POV), because I really latched on to these paragraphs and this story in general as offering more of a concrete understanding of what makes slash a possibility for so many women, and why they would find a male/male model appealing, even if they themselves are lesbians. (While the article focused on truck stop "societies" as a model, it's primarily about studying forbidden topics such as duality in sexual identity, pornography, sex work, and the spread of diseases.)

Instead of seeming reductive, to me, this information felt like it was opening up whole new ideas about the nature of what women find erotic, and a kind of nice, empowering little set of words we could pull out the next time someone chastises us for being into slash.

What do you think?

Comments

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Wow -- that's fascinating.

I'd love to respond to it in greater depth when I'm not at work and have more time to give some real thought to how I think I'm wired, why slash works for me, and whether any of my own responses might be generalizable...

...but for now I just wanted to thank you for the excerpt, because it's really cool. And fwiw, I'm with you that this information seems to open up a whole bunch of new ideas about the nature of what women find erotic...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

came from boni

it's late and hot here, so i only skimmed the 5 pages about the research on truck-stop-sex, but i found the results of the porn-watching you mention very interesting (was there any more detail on that experiment?).

i have been studying gender in visual media (on and off), but i got sick of always ending up in the binary equation/opposition. personally, this simple fact always made most sense: not only do we have a male model of sexuality, but 99,9 % of all stories, pictures, films, etc. are from a male point of view. growing up with that, girls might (subconsciously??) identify with any character in the text (i like more recent findings/opinions on fluidity of identification, although i do not like some rather wishy-washy texts on the subject). as in my own case, at one point this identification must clash, when the conscious cannot ignore the role of the female anymore. this can either lead to acceptance and adoption of (one of) the expected roles, or an uncomfortable split/in-between state.
and slash can fill that crack, and make enjoyment of the situation, desire and arousal, possible again.

just one, very laymanlike expressed option of many!

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I never went looking to see if there was any more information on the porn-watching study, probably because I am a)lazy and b) not smart enough to read an actual paper. ;-) But I imagine it must be very interesting, and just the fact htat someone finally actually bothered to look at this through the lens of a controlled study is really gratifying.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

i still think a smart (scientific) writer should be able to make absolutely everyone understand their point. now to find them ...

forgot to say last time: very nice icons :)

[mlyn.livejournal.com]

I think I want to read *that* article too, along with the Vin one. ;) That study sounds absolutely fascinating. Sorry I can't offer any more opinions than that; I'm not well-versed in the current scientific theories of sexuality as you and other readers here seem to be, and some of this is going over my head, but it's still interesting.

My friend darkrhiannon has thought about doing a paper on why women seek out and enjoy slash, and I've just been waiting for her to find the time. I'm going to send her a link to this post and hope she enjoys it as much as I did.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Trust me, I'm not either! I'm woefully underintelligent when it comes to this stuff, so thank god for magazines that can put it in terms even a dork like me can understand.

[onetwomany.livejournal.com]

You had plenty to offer in the way of good conversation :)

It was fantastic to meet you and Min. Hopefully I'll be in Seattle again and we can do the encore eventually :)

[darkrhiannon.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating. I went through your link to the entire article and found myself (as usual) getting steamed at the government. Shortsighted bastards are fine with pork barrel politics when it funds more ads for cars, but not when the NIH wants to study and reduce the spread of AIDS?!

On the slash topic, I, too, have found myself waffling (the real reason that I haven't yet completed the article for Chrislee's Octaves of the Heart site on why women like slash.

First, of course, there is the woman in question, because we are not all the same. Why do het women like slash? Why do gay women like slash? Why does this one like it but that one hate it? Why do I like to read it, and write it, while others only read it?

I do think there is something to the argument that pov is key, but I don't necessarily believe that this is solely due to self-insertion in the submissive/or either role, as has been posited. I think, for myself, anyway, as a practicing binogomous, bisexual woman, part of the equation is pure pleasure at the pretty--Spike + Angel = more squee for me. I have never identified with any of the female characters on Buffy save for Tara, and she has never been canonically paired with a male, thus self-insertion into a pairing of that nature would have to be fanon, though that is hardly rare. However, I identify with Tara as a gay woman, not as a straight woman, thus when I write her (which is rare, because I have difficulty with her voice), I write Tara/Willow.

I wish I'd been able to do the slash panel, but was tied up with another at the time. What were your conclusions there?

Thanks for this fascinating post!!!

-Rhi

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

For so long, most of the "reasons" academics gave for women wanting to write and read slash have always centered on sociological characteristics (and some of them are just execrable theories, especially that Camille Bacon Smith crap about writing through our pain -- gah!), so I think what really hit me about those two paragraphs was that for once, we have something that talks about some kind of internal hardwiring. It doesn't mean all women want to do slash, but it at least, finally, gives us something physiological to use to extrapolate from, and I was really grateful for that information.

I wish I'd been able to do the slash panel, but was tied up with another at the time. What were your conclusions there?

Is this in reference to writercon? I'm not sure what you mean, otherwise -- I wasn't at writercon, so I'm not sure what the panel was about. I go to a slash con every year in LA, and so I would probably not have gone to a slash panel even at writercon if I were there -- just because the last thing I want is to hear the slash nazis getting into it with the anti-slashers (shudder), or worse, a possible "we are the world" come to jesus panel, which seems, lately, like what's happening in the slash world around me. ;-)

[debxena.livejournal.com]

That was a fascinating article, so thank you for linking to it. And while I found the comments on female arousal interesting, I was particularly taken with the notion that so many people are opposed to these types of research. It’s kinda sad really.

I’ll be adding this to my memories, as I’d like to come back to it again.

[cy-girl.livejournal.com]

I've been a little chagrined for not particularly caring for slash and usually keep this to myself because it seems that this is sometimes misconstrued as a judgement against it. My personal preference aside, I think it can only be a positive for women to decide for themselves what is erotic and not be bound by convention.

The article reminded me of a book "My Own Country" written by a young Indian physician who practiced in Johnson City Tennessee. He specialized in infectious diseases and chronicled the rise of the AIDS epidemic in the 80's in his rural community which came about in large part because of the truck stop environment described in the article.